{"slug": "hating-ai-in-2026", "title": "Hating AI in 2026", "summary": "A veteran machine learning practitioner argues that the AI industry's focus on large language models and chatbots is a misguided mania, causing environmental harm through increased energy consumption while failing to justify its social costs. The author contends that despite widespread belief in climate change, AI adoption continues to drive fossil fuel demand, and moral critiques of the technology are ignored by those invested in it.", "body_md": "I was proposing my doctoral dissertation fifteen years ago when neural network machine learning models entered a second Renaissance. Over the ensuing decade they eclipsed other techniques for classifying and generating many kinds of digital material—including images, sound, and text. The technical details aren’t important here, but the text-generating models support a neat trick: they have become so good at picking the next words in a sequence that they can be incorporated into programs that create an illusion, for a while anyway, of understanding instructions and mimicking an actual human in conversation. We call these programs “chatbots” and they have enthralled business leaders, politicians, and most of my professional sphere.\n\nPeople have lost their minds over a *neat trick*. There was a period, hopefully nearing its end finally, when it was *common* for otherwise sensible people to think that next-word-generating machines were close to achieving human-like consciousness. Experts in cognition and language have continually explained why this won’t happen, but that’s a mania for you. People still call this whole suite of technologies “artificial intelligence,” so that’s what I’ll do here.\n\nWhat does it feel like to work in tech right now and exist outside this spell? Few of my contemporaries want hear about it, but to preserve my sanity I will imagine that someday, somebody might.\n\nThe largest tech companies—which already comprise an uncomfortably large portion of the economy (in spite of the fact that they produce none of the necessities of life)—have bet their fortunes on AI. Actual innovation in neural networks themselves has slowed as the companies and investors focus on building larger models, requiring tremendous amounts of training data and energy to create.\n\nIt’s worth highlighting that explicit climate denialism is well out of vogue here in 2026. Most people profess belief in the scientific consensus that society’s dependence on fossil fuels is warming the climate. This stops few of them from using a technology that is directly increasing society’s thirst for oil. When people like me argue that this technology is unfit for adoption on the basis of its energy requirements alone, AI users will simply ignore anything that we have to say.\n\nThis is the template for a common pattern. We can point out all of the harms being done by the technology *right now*, and we can speak to the additional harms that will be done if things continue like this, but our concerns are spurned or ignored. AI users seem untroubled by—or unaware of—the dissonance, because the richest individuals and corporations have decided that the future must be built on this specific approach to this specific technology that they own.\n\nSome people find chatbots useful and I can’t argue with their opinion, but nobody is doing anything with them that remotely justifies their socialized costs. I’m compelled to note that I’ve been a machine learning practitioner for 20 years, and was excited about last decade’s neural network developments, but this train has gone off the rails.\n\nA reader from the future may have a better perspective than I do about this, but my best guess is that people today are inoculated against moral critiques of social and technological systems—i.e., anything that points out that something is *bad* because it *hurts people*. There’s nothing wrong with moral arguments, but we exist in a world where it’s impossible to live a regular life (within the world’s rich countries) without relying on the exploitation of countless people and finite environmental resources; any coherent pro-social moral stance is instantly compromised upon contact with this society.\n\nSomething seems to be lost on my peers today: **it’s still easy to not use AI**. The food we eat, clothes we wear, and every electronic device we touch may embody innumerable injuries to the world, and all this is inescapable. Eschewing AI is *one thing* that we can actually do to live out ethics that affirm values of human and environmental rights. It’s almost a gift! Just *use a computer the same way you did three years ago*!\n\nIf any but the most optimistic prognostications about this technology come to pass, chroniclers will wonder why more people didn’t do that. I’m baffled too! My emotional state in this moment recalls that from late 2002, during the lead-up to the US invasion of Iraq. It seemed obvious then that the people leading the nation were lying to justify war, and that nothing good would come of it (for anyone but a small handful of rich people anyway), yet the media and much of the population treated critics with absolute contempt. Being anti-AI feels the same as being anti-war. The salient differences between then and now are that the bloodshed will be harder to attribute (how many people are killed by one tenth of one degree of global warming, and what proportion of that temperature rise comes from one specific gas-burning data center?), and that more of my actual peers—including dear friends—are on the wrong side of this. The familiarity stings, but the pattern is repeating itself because nothing has fundamentally changed about us since then.\n\nI’ve struggled to write something that would persuade my colleagues and friends to ditch AI and affirm their avowed beliefs about climate change, the trustworthiness of megacorporations, and our right to live and work with dignity. I accept that I’m not up to that task. So I wrote this instead for anyone who someday wonders what the hell is wrong with us. I can’t ask that reader to forgive us, only to understand that we’re not bad people. We’re regular people living in a situation that rewards bad decisions and punishes good ones.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hating-ai-in-2026", "canonical_source": "https://www.eamoncaddigan.net/posts/ai-in-2026/", "published_at": "2026-07-14 11:34:45+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-14 13:19:27.075166+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "large-language-models", "ai-ethics", "ai-policy", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hating-ai-in-2026", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hating-ai-in-2026.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hating-ai-in-2026.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/hating-ai-in-2026.jsonld"}}